Equity Replay: Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says the lesson for founders now is that a great model isn't enough

**Julie Bort** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to Equity, TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups. I'm Startups Editor Julie Bort, and today we're joined by Matt Murphy of Menlo Ventures. He's amassed stakes in many of the biggest names in AI, like Anthropic, OpenRouter, Lovable. Today, we're talking about Anthropic's stunning growth, how AI is different from other big tech waves, and what founders can learn from it.
Hi, Matt, welcome to the show.

**Matt Murphy** (0:29)
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

**Julie Bort** (0:31)
All right. So let's talk about the company of 2026, Anthropic.
And in 2024, you led a more than 500 million dollar investment in Anthropic, leading at Series D. So just to clarify, you aren't a board member, but are you a board observer or anything like that? How does your relationship with Anthropic work?

**Matt Murphy** (0:53)
Yeah, I was a board observer right after the Series D, and then as more rounds have followed after that, I'm no longer a board observer, but at the same time, very involved with a lot of the team members there, fortunately and gratefully. Bunch of great people.

**Julie Bort** (1:10)
All right. Well, let's just start with, do you use Anthropic, Claude, yourself? And how do you use it?

**Matt Murphy** (1:16)
Obviously, everyone starts off a little bit more like Q&A. It's having a smart friend about anything that you want to ask. And then, really in the firm, we've done a lot of work with Co-Work, Claude Co-Work, and so built a bunch of skills. Everything from, hey, look through my email. I'm going to CEO updates us on, let's say, the end of the quarter results, package that up in a way that I can share it on Slack with my partners to, hey, take a look at through my email and let me know when I'm supposed to follow up on this company. We can integrate it with Affinity, Slack, various other tools like Harmonic we have to kind of look for different signals on entrepreneurs and companies that we're tracking and things like that. So it's really become kind of our substrate to make us more efficient and productive and collaborative as an investment team.

**Julie Bort** (2:10)
And what about personally? Do you have like claws running all over on your PCs? Do they like making investments for you?

**Matt Murphy** (2:19)
My use cases are broad. Everything from a cool trip and I like these kind of places. Where do you think I should go in this geography that has cool places like this?
It's just the best research friend and product and tool you could have. I mean, all the things that I sit there and I'm like, who are the three or four experts I can talk to to help me get more knowledgeable or smart about this? I've got Claude. It's so much more efficient and then you can kind of like, you know, get to a different level of precision or dumb it down or whatever. So it kind of gives you all the mix of those friends that you might go find somewhere.

**Julie Bort** (2:57)
Okay. So just to set a baseline, it sounds like you're a user like most of us in the tech industry, but not necessarily a power user that is running your entire life through Claude.

**Matt Murphy** (3:06)
Yeah, no, I'm not like, I've got plenty of partners like Tim Tully, DeeDee Doss, Matt Cramming, who are like building things and even building things for our portfolio companies. So I'm probably not as much of that, much of a power user, but I'm grateful to have partners who are and watch them.

**Julie Bort** (3:26)
Tell us an early story about Anthropic, like those early days, like what was it that wowed you about the company, its sibling founders, like what's unique about them that caused you and Menlo to go all in, like so early in 2024 before they had become this company they are today.

**Matt Murphy** (3:45)
Yeah. I mean, I love telling this story because some things were obvious, some things were difficult, some things were very not obvious at the time. But what was obvious is that Dario is a special founder. You meet him and he's got this just like boyish energy and charm, but underneath that, just like his knowledge about AI and what needs to be built and how to build it, was just exceptional and then met other folks like Tom Brown and Daniella, just knew that it was a special team. What they've done in the past speaks for itself, right? Like Dario was the founder of ChatGPT in OpenAI, and he realized that they were trying to do too many things, but this was the opportunity. So what founder origin stories do you love? I love when a founder is like, I'm in this company, I see the really big opportunity, but they're not focused on it right now.